Categories

Categories in Eclipse SmartHome are used to provide meta information about things channels, etc. UIs can use this information to render specific icons or provide a search functionality to for example filter all things for a certain category.

Differences between categories

We seperate the categories into functional and visual. Therefore we treat thing categories as how the physical device looks like and channel categories as something that describes the functional purpose of the channel.

Thing Categories

The thing type definition allows to specify a category. User interfaces can parse this category to get an idea how to render this thing. A binding can classify each thing into one of the existing categories. The list of all predefined categories can be found in our categories overview:

Category

Description

Icon Example

Battery

Batteries, Energy Storages

Blinds

Roller shutters, window blinds, etc.

Camera

All kinds of cameras

Car

Smart Cars

CleaningRobot

Vacuum robots, mopping robots, etc.

Door

Door

FrontDoor

Front Door

GarageDoor

Garage Door

HVAC

Air condition devices, Fans

Inverter

Power inverter, such as solar inverters etc.

LawnMower

Lawn mowing robots, etc.

Lightbulb

Devices that illuminate something, such as bulbs, etc.

Lock

Devices whose primary pupose is locking something

MotionDetector

Motion sensors/detectors

NetworkAppliance

Bridges/Gateway need to access other devices like used by Philips Hue for example, Routers, Switches

PowerOutlet

Small devices to be plugged into a power socket in a wall which stick there

Channel Group Categories

Channel groups can be seen as a kind of sub-device as they combine certain (physical) abilities of a thing into one. For such group channels one can set a category from the thing category list.

Channel Categories

The channel type definition allows to specify a category. A binding should classify each channel into one of the existing categories or leave the category blank, if there is no good match. There are different types of categories for channels, which are listed below.